


[Meta] No Hold’s Meta on Mama McGarrett

by wanderlustlover



Series: Hawaii Five-0 Season Three Meta [1]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2017-12-06 06:15:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A meta piece on Steve & Doris McGarrett circa episode 3.18.</p>
            </blockquote>





	[Meta] No Hold’s Meta on Mama McGarrett

So, I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about last night’s episode, but I’d rather not step into the fandom storm center that has to do with Lenkov-Michelle-Cath-Steve today, so what I really want to talk about right now is is Doris McGarrett. 

Yeah. Doris McGarrett. 

Who faked her own death. 

Who ruined her husband’s life, and left him with only one thing he could focus on for the eighteen years after she died: tracking down her murderer. Even at the expense of sending his children as far from that truth as possible. Who literally dies, by assasination, without ever getting to know the truth.

Who ruined her children’s lives, both their childhood and their adulthood.  Who have to live with the truth, their mother did this to all three of them and then has the gaul to  **demand** they all forgive her and understand that this is the only way everything ever could have gone. 

 

Who, god, let me honest, I desperately wanted to be Irina Derevko (for those of you with an ALIAS background, and know what I’m talking about). Who was brilliant and damn scary and held every secret in the secret box in her hands, who broke your heart, and several main characters, in regular bouts, like she was born to do it. But with good reason, and a massively torn up conscience because of it all. 

 

Every time I see Doris now I feel like the nails in my coffin are pounded in harder and harder, until every time Doris opens her mouth I want to shake her until her teeth rattle and it makes sense how much she does not deserve anything she keeps forcing down Steve or Mary’s throat. So. Let’s get started

…

This episode starts with Doris and Steve recreating together which is, okay, a little weird, but plausible. Steve like active things, and doing them is probably far easier than having the kind of bonding emotional things to do that McGarrett’s of every kind don’t do (Reference Mary Ann’s entire rant about picnic’s in 1.04). Which is fine. But the moment we get to the fight, I felt like head desking my living room table. 

Especially when Steve points out that he has issues, trust issues, and can we stop and talk about how often Steve ever says anything that clear about his issues? He’s literally throwing it and himself on the damn table, while he knows she’s lying to him about something, and she tells him point blank “To get over it.” 

Like she hasn’t: Railroaded into his life, broken into his house, gotten his girlfriend/oldest friend to lie for her, manipulated him at every turn to feel guilty for every time he doubts her, no matter how much proof he’s amassed to the contrary. 

And I just. I’m stopping to face palm in the middle of writing this. 

Because he’s obviously still trying here. To get her to talk. To give her some chance to still come clean with him. Admitting that he has issues….even when he knows she’s the source of them. Even when she knows she’s doing all these things, and back handing any chance he’s handing her, like he’s a confused child and wrong about all his mistaken conclusions. 

Then we tangle this up in mentioning she’s going to lunch with Catherine, and this whole comment just spiraled a world of pain for me. These two people who are lying to him, who know that each other are lying to him, and covering back and forth from each other,  **are socializing together**. 

And he doesn’t even know they do this. Lunching thing. 

Because he looks so confused that they are  _going_  to lunch together. 

In a common, constant, worth of joking about it way (both from Doris’s side in her scene, and Cath’s in the following team scene). Like neither of them feels any guilt or uncomfortableness about the position where they spend social time together, getting to know one another now. (And lets be honest, I love Cath and I wanted to love Doris, but point out to me one single episode between 1.08 and 1.18 where either of them has shown having a guilty conscience? Not fanon, not what we all hope, including myself, was just missed or cut.  **Show me a true canon second where either of them felt/showed guilt for any of it. For. Ten. Episodes. Worth. Of. Time.**

There is a massive difference between a) actual remorse & coming clean because it is the right thing to do and b) coming clean at the 11th hour so that someone won’t die by their, or your, own stupidity. 

And it is a difference that matters a lot to me. 

And I bet to Steve.) 

…

Skip forward, to the next two times we see Doris. In a house. in HER new house. Uh. What? When did this happen? When 3.16 has her coming down the stairs, cock blocking another Steve-Cath couch make-out/sex scene, from preparing for her date with Mick upstairs, and leaving (after guilting him about the PI thing) by telling him not to wait up for her? 

Why is there a house? How did this happen? Why? When? 

Especially if the first scene still had her saying Mick was following her around all PI style this week. This makes no logical linear sense. I’m so confused. I don’t get how and when and why this house even exists. Except to confuse me. 

And then with Steve in the hospital. 

Where he calls her on her crap more than once and she continues to say it’s nothing. That she has no idea why anyone would break into this new house with a massive security system, or how they got the jump on her. He continues to lay these facts out in front of her. To point out how ludicrous it sound, how she’s shoving him away, how she’s lying, how none of it lines up. 

How much he wants _to help, to fix it, to protect her_. And she just keeps shoving him right back out the door, saying it’s absolutely nothing and how he’s exaggerating and how he shouldn’t worry. While she’s sitting there after being robbed and beaten up, with the mother of all huge red marks across her forehead.

…

Fastfoward to our massive fall out scene with Doris, who spends the whole thing doing her speciality, which we have seen since 3.01 — crying, while berating her son, angrily, and demanding that he understand that everything she’s done has always been for everyone’s best interest. Especially her family’s. 

You know. All of it. The lying. The not dying. The staying away twenty-two years. The breaking in. The stealing things. The lying about death threats. The lying about torturing someone. The lying about not lying. The making the only person he’s known for potentially over a decade lie to him. The lying every time he tried to call her on it, or give her a platform to come clean. The constant making fun of him for hiring a PI to follow her around because she’s so obviously innocent, or would answer his questions if asked, because she hasn’t been lying every time he has asked them, up to and including this whole episode. 

**And she can’t possibly understand why he’s hurt and angry and not on her side.**

I mean it’s not like she ruined a good 90% of his past and present, and now taken the single only person he had gotten to have for the worst parts of his life, while he was still standing there, holding the door open for her, because she’s his mother and he’s been kicked black and blue by the world since he was fifteen and she died, all but begging her (“With his trust issues”) to let him in. Still.

 

Because I think this sums it up really well, for my feelings on these three right now: 

S: Is it not enough that you can’t open your mouth without lying to me, you gotta use Catherine against me, too? 

D: I wasn’t trying to use Catherine, I was trying to protect you.

S: Would you just stop for a minute. Just stop, alright. Catherine and I had a good thing going. And now what? 

Doris: Steve. That girl loves you. She was trying to hurt you. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. 

S: Mom. you don’t get it. You still don’t get it. 

Dear Doris, please let me shake you until your teeth rattle. And then break.  **He’s tried for 18 episodes. To understand how you love him, while you lie to him every time you open your mouth. How you love him, or you are defending Cath loving him, if you are both lying to him, and have been for a long time.**

Please. Yes. Go on. Keep telling me how this man will not have issues with how love is displayed for another decade or the rest of his life, if this is how his mother and his oldest friend/girl friend can treat him, both unremorsefully until their hands are literally caught in the cookie jar. Neither of them willing to talk to him until it actually shoved Doris into the hospital this time. 

 

Also, then you tell him about microfishe? Under the floorboard? In the house she broke into it 3.04, played on Steve’s guilt to get to move in under, and then stole from the house without telling him. That she left in the floorboard of their house, for their entire lives, whatever childhood they both did and didn’t have. This ticking time-bomb, that none of them knew about, or could have protected themselves from. 

On top of the not-dying. Yeah. More nails in the coffin. 

More “I was right to do this” even if it  **only ever**  endangered your lives. 

Where even when you were dead you left a guillotine swinging over their necks.

 

Doris. Doris, I’m so done that it leaves me feeling nauseous.

You’re a better villain of his entire life than Wo Fat could or has ever been.

You took his childhood, you took every chance, you took his oldest friend.  

And you still keep saying it’s because you love him, and only to protect him. 


End file.
